Ida and Studs Terkel at the first Studs Terkel Community Media Awards in 1994

Advance registration is closed! Please feel free to join us as a walk-in this evening if you would like to attend

5 p.m. drinks, 6 p.m. program followed by entertainment & food

Silent auction, 5 to 8 p.m.

Wednesday, March 10 at the GAR Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph St., Chicago

Read more about it here.

Writing To Make The News
9 a.m. to noon, Thursday, March 18
$95 REGISTER

Learn the basics and more: how to write a press release, the difference between a media alert, news release, and pitch letter, and how to produce polished versions of all three. Along the way, Alton Miller, author, press secretary to the late Harold Washington, and Columbia College dean offers insights into effective public relations. Learn:

•    Pre-writing and preparation
•    Editing to strengthen your writing skills
•    How to deliver your messages in the context of an integrated marketing communication campaign

If you struggle to communicate your story ideas to the media, then it’s time to learn new writing techniques. Learn successful techniques to write clearly and concisely in ways that help deliver your messages starting as soon as your next news release.

Trainer: Alton Miller is currently associate dean of the School of Media Arts and a tenured associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches public relations writing and political PR. The first half of his PR career (1965-85) was in the performing arts. From 1985-87 he was press secretary to Chicago mayor Harold Washington, and his PR work has continued in politics and arts advocacy, including work as communications director for Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, City Treasurer Miriam Santos, and the Illinois Arts Alliance. He is the author of three nonfiction books, including a memoir, “Harold Washington: The Mayor, The Man.” In 2005 he received his M.F.A. in Writing from Goddard College. His thesis was a political novel, “Chicago Power & Light.“

Our deep apologies for all of you trying to reach us via email today. Our income server at hostway.com was down for a few hours earlier today but we are now back up and running.

So you can now email us, send us your questions, ask us for some advice or just pass along some good vibes!

Thanks for your patience,

The Workshop Team

“Rocket science is important, but what makes it interesting?” says Garrard McClendon, host of his own ChicagoLand TV  show  Monday through Saturday for a half-hour at 6 and 9:30 p.m.

McClendon uses every new-fangled new-media tool in the playbook, but says old-fashioned pitching tips still apply: be persistent, make sure your topic is newsworthy, and have a good answer for what makes your issue interesting. “Tell us what you do that’s great,” he says. “What is your content?”

Once-a-year pitchers (you know who you are) may not make their way onto McClendon’s show: he suggests you pitch early and often. Would-be sources should consider sending releases several times a week to gain his producers’ attention. “Tyra Banks sends out 2,500 press releases to the media on a daily basis,” he says. To grab his or his producers’ attention, nonprofits should send out their message on a constant basis with attention-grabbing subject lines and first paragraphs.

Specifically, he says news releases should be sent to wgntvinfo@tribune.com, adding “ATTN WGN” and “ATTN CLTV” to the subject line (CLTV is a property of Tribune Corp). When sending your press release make sure your issue is in the title and/or headline, said McClendon. Read the rest of this entry »

Take Social Media to the Next Level
9 a.m. to noon Thursday, March 4
218 S. Wabash – Rm 806

You have the Facebook page, you’re on Twitter, and you’re dabbling with many other social media platforms. Now, learn to use the tools to the max to tell your organization’s stories better and faster than you thought possible.

In this training you will learn how to:

•    Assess which social media tools are right for your organization and strategy
•    Craft a brand message to move online audiences to action
•    Connect social media to existing/traditional advertising and communications
•    Coordinate social media tools so your blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc. present the same message

Adam Thurman has used social media and other strategies to help Court Theatre achieve some of the highest grossing productions in their more than 50-year history. He recommends this workshop for leaders who can make strategic decisions about your social media and overall policies.

Register Today! Cost $95

About Adam Thurman
Adam is president of Mission Paradox, a consulting firm that focuses on marketing and branding issues.  As part of Mission Paradox he has led presentations and workshops for Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Civic Knowledge Project and the Arts and Business Council.

He is also director of marketing and communications at Court Theatre, one of the largest nonprofit theatres in Chicago. During his tenure as director of marketing the theatre has had some of the highest grossing productions in their more than 50-year history.

Adam is a former board member of the League of Chicago Theatres and has served on the Illinois Arts Council’s Advisory Panel.  He has been recognized as an Emerging Leader by Americans For the Arts and the Theatre Communication Group. He has also been featured in Time Out Chicago, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Artist Resource.

Partnerships, project-based reporting and community service are among the competitive advantages public-radio news operations offer at the local level, news and program directors noted in our recent webinar on Changing Public Radio.

The combination of local news staff and D.C.-based National Public Radio foreign correspondents (who now outnumber those of CNN) makes for among the best news staff in the country. But that combination has challenges of its own, such as figuring out how the national and local organizations can work together.

“NPR gives us such a journalistic firepower that it is hard to match,” said Jerome Vaughn, news director of Detroit Public Radio. “Before, our competitors were basically the other stations here in Detroit. But with the Web, now we’ve got to think of NPR in some ways as a partial competitor for funding. There’s been a lot of discussion about that and hopefully that’ll come to some completely beneficial conclusion.”

Tamar Charney of Michigan Public Radio pointed out that national and local news staffs are finding new ways to work together: “NPR has been changing its attitude a little bit. It used to be they did their own thing in Washington and we did our own thing but with new management in the past year they have a new attitude.… Just yesterday with the asian carp summit we were going to send somebody in but with the weather we couldn’t possibly get there. NPR actually sent somebody to the White House to make sure we got the tape.”

Pitching public radio makes good sense because of the emphasis on local news and connections to the community at public radio, said Vaughn, Charney, and the other two participants, Steve Edwards of Chicago Public Radio and Bill Wheelhouse of WUIS in Springfield, Ill. (Thom Clark of the Workshop moderated). Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Culbertson lead a "social media need to know" workshop and Sue O'Halloran presented her popular storytelling workshop in Lansing in November.

Learn to tell stories that sing and use channels that work!

When: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, March 4 DATE TBA!

Where: ARISE Detroit, 5830 Field, Detroit

We’ve postponed the next in our popular series of day-long conferences on nonprofit communications to make sure that we have enough time to get the word out about the event and that folks are able to make time in their schedules to get there! If you have questions, please contact Gordon Mayer.

Want more information? Read about a similar event, held in Lansing in November, here. See feedback from participants at that event here.

Co-sponsored by Michigan Nonprofit Association and ARISE Detroit, underwritten by Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Kathryn Born produces Chicago Art Magazine

A couple weeks or so ago the Museum of Contemporary Art bought “Kiss,” performance art by Tino Seghal, with no paper, video or other documentation changing hands. Kathryn Born’s ChicagoArtMagazine covered the acquisition.

She also has a great article on artwork being done in Chicago’s Korean-American community and is looking for more like it. If you have a story to tell related to art in Chicago, Born does not just want you to pitch her, she may ask you to produce it yourself! She might even pay you, as she writes at her site:

We need feature writers, journalists, researchers and gallery reviewers. The thing we need to know is, ‘What are you already an expert in?’ Do you have experience interviewing people? Did you study art in school? Or journalism? We need writing samples and some idea about experience. The pay is awful – $25 for features [CMW note: in this case awful=industry standard, no?] , however, we publicize all features and try to achieve a large audience for each of our writers.

Born runs three related sites. In addition to ChicagoArtMagazine.com, which covers articles, reviews, and satire, she maintains ChicagoArtMap, a Google map with 171 galleries and other places that show art in the region alongside a Google calendar, and ChicagoArtCollector.com with similar and in some cases overlapping content. Read the rest of this entry »

Social Media Need To Know For Managers
9 a.m. to noon, Wednesday, Feb. 17

What we need to know about social media changes all the time as nonprofits change how we use online tools and share. This workshop will help those who supervise work with external audiences as well as those doing it day to day to think through some of the challenges it presents to the organization as well as one or two of the most significant new hands-on skills to have.

In this session you will learn:

•    How and why nonprofits are leading in adopting Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more social media tools
•    Listening techniques—simple ways to ensure your organization is participating in online conversations that relate to you and your work areas
•    Common issues that come up as nonprofits add social media to their communications toolkits and how to lead your organization through them

Whether you run your organization or not, find out what kind of changes using Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs may bring to your organization and assess how to lead you’re your group through those changes.

Register Today!

About Emily
Before moving to Chicago in 2008, Emily Culbertson was Web managing director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where she co-led a re-launch of RWJF.org in June 2008 and helped coordinate the foundation’s social media. Prior to that she was a senior account manager and eHealth strategist at I-SITE, a Philadelphia-based web agency, and she began her web career as a multimedia editor for the University of Pennsylvania Health System’s consumer Web site. She has also covered federal courts for the Associated Press, several Philadelphia suburban daily newspapers and Philadelphia’s legal daily newspaper. Culbertson is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in urban studies.

The panelists for “How Weblogs are Transforming the Media Landscape,” at the Community Media Workshop’s Making Media Connections conference: (left to right) Andrew Huff (Gaper’s Block), Barbara Iverson (moderator, Columbia College Chicago) and Eric Zorn (Chicago Tribune). (Photo by Jason Pettus on Flickr.com)

The web has made it easier for us to get our stories out, but what about our events? Most journalists will admit that covering a nonprofit event such as a fundraiser won’t make the headlines unless you have some untouchable “newsworthy” guest or if you are savvy enough to bridge the event to current breaking news features.

But what most people don’t know is that news sites often have “community calendars” where users can submit their own events or tips to be published on their site and in some cases featured in the day’s news broadcast or news publication. Read the rest of this entry »